Directory of Research and Expertise

Thesis Title: The Perceptual Experience of Lived History: Fragmented Temporalities Amidst the Battle for Britain, 1940-41

Abstract: 

In my writing and research at the Institute of Historical Research, I am exploring the experience of time and perception, i.e. the fragmentary nature of ‘lived history’, as it occurred to individual Britons during the opening stages of the Second World War. Due to the generous encouragement of Dr. Langhamer, I am conceiving of a thesis far different from most: a mixture of ‘philosophical literature review’ (of the philosophical history of the notions of time and the Present), a traditional literature review, followed by a highly immersive ‘experientialist’ approach to the days between 15 May 1940 and 22 June 1941. 

I want to offer my reader a first-hand perspective, via incisive fragments of ‘moments,’ whereby the chaotic, pointillistic experience of the Battle for Britain was received by the British populace. From high to low, from powerful to powerless, from the home counties to further afield, it is my argument that, like a stained glass, it is only as we valorize the random, fleeting, and seemingly mundane slivers of perception—right alongside the heroic and ‘glorious’—that those 403 days come into a more perceptible, enlightened, enlightening focus. As Augustine of Hippo once described the experience of our memory—individually and collectively—as being the ‘present of past things’ ('Confessions'), so the historian, historiographer, and historical readership may be aided by imaginative embodiment of the situated momentary 'Now'.